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Tony Lip Dies; Played Many Wiseguys Onscreen

Tony Lip, an actor known for playing mobsters on “The Sopranos” and in many feature films, died last Friday in Teaneck, N.J. He was 82.

Family members told The Record of Woodland Park that Mr. Lip, whose real name was Frank Anthony Vallelonga and who lived in Paramus, died at a hospital in Teaneck after several years of failing health.

Mr. Lip was best known for playing the mob kingpin Carmine Lupertazzi in several episodes of “The Sopranos,” the HBO series about the personal and professional life of a troubled mob boss played by James Gandolfini. He made his movie debut in an uncredited role as a wedding guest in “The Godfather” and also appeared in “Goodfellas,” “Raging Bull,” “Donnie Brasco” and other films.

In the 1960s, before becoming an actor, he worked at the Copacabana nightclub in Manhattan, where among the celebrities he met were the kind of gangsters he would later portray.

DOMINICK CICALE, A FORMER CAPO IN THE BONANNO CRIME FAMILY, ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS
In 1999, Bronx-based Dominick Cicale finished his second years-long bit and hooked up with Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano, then an up-and-coming member of the Bronx faction of the Bonanno crime family.

Initially he'd been closely affiliated with "Big Ernie" in the Genovese family.

You've heard of On the Waterfront? This guy apparently owned it.... Well, huge swaths of it, anyway..... Reputed Genovese soldier Salvatore (Sallie) DeMeo, 77, was busted on tax-evasion charges this past Thursday for failing to report $2 million in capital gains income and not ponying up about $367,000 in taxes.

However, it's not mob-related, the Feds say. The mob-related stuff was last month. DeMeo got off in September with five years' probation. In Brooklyn Supreme Court he copped to participating in a loansharking and gambling racket.

Peter "Peter Pasta" Pellegrino, formerly of the Babylon, New York, restaurant known as Peter’s Italian Restaurant, really is -- or was -- a gangster.

The once-promising Bonanno member who appeared after the Kitchen Nightmares episode aired, now calls himself a brokester. And the Bonanno crime family, with which he was once affiliated has disowned him.

So has the rest of New York's Cosa Nostra, according to FBI documents and Peter Pasta himself.

But before all that he appeared on an episode of Kitchen Nightmares in which he acted very much like the mobster he allegedly was trying to become around the time of filming. (See Peter's Italian Restaurant menu here.)

Back then Peter Pasta was an up-and-coming Bonanno associate who "earned" $15 grand a week bookmaking.

Formerly known as the Profaci crime family, for its original boss, it only became the Colombo family in the 1960s when family member Joseph Colombo went to the Commission to spill the beans on plans made by Profaci's short-term sucessor in cahoots with Joseph Bonanno of the Bonanno crime family.

Boss Profaci was involved in the crime family's first war, against the upstart Gallo brothers who felt the upper-echelon bosses were taking more than their fair share from the soldiers.